This Body is Bullshit

Taking care of my dad has me thinking about my mom. Not in a nostalgic way. In a guilty way. In a what-did-I-do-and-what-didn’t-I-do way.

Watching how present I am with my dad, I find myself thinking about her end of life and how different I was then. How much less present. And it sits with me in a way that’s uncomfortable. But to be honest, at the time I thought I was showing tough love. I thought I was trying not to enable her. I certainly wasn’t trying to hurt her. I justify some of it, and the justification is real: her decline was long. More than twenty years of watching her light slowly dim.

She went from this outspoken, funny, big personality, the kind of person who filled a room, to someone who was practically a recluse. Antisocial. Withdrawn. Hard to reach. And I was mad about that for a long time. I resented her for it. I didn’t understand it. As a mother myself, I still don’t understand how you don’t fight through anything to be there for your child or grandchild.

I know that mental illness was a huge part of it, and the more I understand mental illness, the more I understand that it wasn’t her choice. It wasn’t her fault. She was sick in a way nobody really named or treated properly or wanted to acknowledge, and that sickness stole her from us slowly and quietly over a very long time. By the time she was physically dying, I had already been grieving her for years. That’s a particular kind of grief and exhaustion that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.

I also had a different relationship with her than I have with my dad. I’ve always been a daddy’s girl. He was on a pedestal for most of my life. My mom and I were complicated. Frustrating. Sometimes hurtful on both sides. I loved her. I know she loved me. God, she loved Grace and me more than anything, probably to the point where it made her a little crazy with worry. But it was hard. And I think that complicated love made it easier to stay a little more at arm’s length when things got bad.

There’s one thing that says it all, really. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2020, I didn’t tell my mom until two or three days before my mastectomy in March 2021. Because I knew she couldn’t handle it. I knew the news would devastate her in a way that would make everything harder, not easier. So I protected her from it or maybe protected myself from managing her reaction on top of everything else and waited until the last minute. She couldn’t come down to be with me. She couldn’t help me afterward. And that was sad. Not angry-sad. Just genuinely sad. The kind of sad that comes from loving someone and knowing their limitations at the same time. The kind that comes from needing your mom and knowing she wasn’t able to be that for you in that moment. But that’s the illness. I don’t say that to be cruel to her memory. I say it because it’s true and because it was part of what made our relationship what it was. Love and limitation existing in the same space at the same time.

And then at the end, I was there. Visiting on the weekend for the last month or 2. Fully there her last week. Bedside. She went from conscious and saying hilarious things, because even at the end she was funny, that never fully left her, to unconscious and slipping away. I sat with her and whispered that I loved her. That I was there. That it was okay to go. I told her Grace and I were going to be okay because I knew that’s what she needed to hear. I got Grace on the phone and held it to my mom’s ear so she could say whatever last words she wanted to say to her grandmother. My mom left us later that day. I was there.

And then the messages started coming in.

People reminded me of who she was, the person I had forgotten she was, the person I had been grieving for so long that I’d lost the full picture of her. The good old days. The big laughs she brought. The sharp sense of humor. All the things that had dimmed so slowly that I hadn’t realized how much I missed them until old friends and people from her past started describing her back to me.

By the time we gathered for her celebration of life, we’d already been missing her for a long time. But it wasn’t all sadness. Because honestly, have you met us?

Here’s the part that still haunts me about that day. I didn’t prepare a eulogy. I didn’t know how to start one. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel ready. So I went up there and winged it. It was all over the place. I misspoke. I didn’t like how it came out. I walked away feeling like I hadn’t done her justice.

But one of my favorite pictures from that entire day is Grace taking a selfie with my mom’s urn. Grace may or may not have been stoned out of her mind. I cannot confirm or deny. There she is, smiling away, posing with Grandma. And somehow it’s one of the best pictures ever taken. Maybe we’re weird. Maybe we’re slightly deranged. Not maybe. We’re depraved. Whatever. I love it. Because grief in our family was never going to look like everyone dressed in black, sitting solemnly in a room and quietly talking about how sad we all were. We loved my mom. We missed my mom. And we were still us. Laughing at inappropriate things. Taking ridiculous pictures. Telling stories. Probably saying things we shouldn’t say. Pookie would have understood.

When my mom died, I posted a line from Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”. The part about someone’s candle burning out while their legend lived on. Nothing captured her better. Because her light really did dim long before her life ended. That’s the part I understand differently now. For years I thought about how much she’d changed. How small her world had become. How far away she seemed from the Pookie everyone remembered. But her legend didn’t disappear with that light.

It was sitting right there in that room that day. In Aunt Jean and the Mennas, and all those memories of growing up in Indian Head Park and Acacia. In the Joneses and generations of friendship that basically made us family. In Karin and the Hinsdale Dental years. In the stories about the parties at Mort’s house that, I’m probably better off not knowing all the details about. It was in every person who walked into that luncheon carrying a different version of my mother with them. It was in Grace taking a possibly chemically enhanced selfie with her grandmother’s urn. And it was in me. I wish I’d been able to stand up that day and articulate all of this. Because sometimes you have to lose someone, miss them, be angry with them, forgive them, become a caregiver yourself, get older yourself, and live a little more life before you can really see them. I was seeing her differently and wish I had done a better job. But maybe this is what this is. This is her eulogy. And now I forgive more. I appreciate more. I remember more.

And when I picture her now, I don’t want to picture the woman whose world became so small. I picture Pookie. Young. Beautiful. Funny. Caring. Generous. Probably with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, surrounded by people and making somebody laugh.

Her candle may have gone out, but her legend never will.

Long live Pookie. Long live my mom. Love you. Miss you.